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New treasures from outer space as Hubble shoots up a storm

Circling above the Earth at 17,500 miles per hour, the Hubble Space Telescope has been photographing the heavens for two decades. Here are some of its latest pictorial treasures.

Charles Cooper
Charles Cooper was an executive editor at CNET News. He has covered technology and business for more than 25 years, working at CBSNews.com, the Associated Press, Computer & Software News, Computer Shopper, PC Week, and ZDNet.
Charles Cooper
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1 of 12 ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll (Arizona State University),NASA

Crab Nebula

A supernova remnant that astronomers dubbed the Crab Nebula is the only remaining trace of a huge stellar explosion that observers on the ground in China and Japan chronicled in 1054.
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2 of 12 ESA/Hubble and NASA

A riddle inside a mystery

Planetary nebula known as ESO 456-67 in the constellation of Sagittarius (The Archer), in the southern sky. Basically, this is an image of shells of dust and gas pushed outwards from a dying star. What you see at the center is the remnant of the original star. What's to explain the different shapes? Scientists are still trying to answer that question.
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3 of 12 ESA/Hubble and NASA

Spiral galaxy IC 5052

You can glimpse part of the spiral galaxy IC 5052 in this image as it emits a bright blue-white glow.
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4 of 12 ESA/NASA/Hubble

Large Magellanic Cloud

The Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, is about 200,000 light-years from Earth. The collapsing clouds of gas within it form new stars. New stars are being born in the glowing nebulae.
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5 of 12 ESA/Hubble and NASA

A ring galaxy to remember

Not much is known about ring galaxies like the one pictured here dubbed Zw II 28. The assumption is that they are formed after galaxy collisions, forming a dense central core circled by bright stars.
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6 of 12 NASA

How's the weather out there?

Hubble data helped NASA create the most detailed weather map yet for a brown dwarf named 2MASSJ22282889-431026. Brown dwarfs are created from condensed gas, but they lack the mass to fuse atoms and produce energy.
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7 of 12 NASA, ESA, and P. Kalas (University of California, Berkeley and SETI Institute)

Space junk -- and then some

A new spin on space junk -- in this case a vast debris disk around the star Fomalhaut. The image also turns up an unidentified mysterious planet circling the star.
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8 of 12 Digitized Sky Survey (DSS), STScI/AURA, Palomar/Caltech, and UKSTU/AAO

Oldest star in our galaxy

The oldest star in our galaxy whose age astronomers can determine is called HD 140283. It's estimated to be 14.5 billion years (give or take 800 million years) and is estimated to be 190.1 light-years away from Earth
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9 of 12 NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage/ESA-Hubble Collaboration

Abell 68

The gravitational field around Abell 68, a cluster of giant galaxies, magnifies light from distant background galaxies.
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10 of 12 ESA/Hubble & NASA

460 light-years away from Earth

About 460 light-years away from Earth resides an object known as HH 151, essentially a bright jet of glowing material trailed by an orange-hued plume of gas and dust. It is located in the constellation of Taurus.
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11 of 12 ESA/Hubble & NASA

NGC 411: Looking good for 1 billion years old

A collection of approximately 150 extremely old stars inhabits our galaxy. They all look a lot like NGC 411, pictured here. But NGC, which was formed from the same gas cloud, is a relative youngster, at an estimated billion years old.
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12 of 12 ESA/Hubble & NASA

A transitional phase for a 'young' star-forming galaxy

The galaxy in this image, 2MASX J09442693+0429569, has been in a near-constant state of formation for the last billion years, and the process only stopped relatively recently.

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